Carbon pricing is the ‘first among equals’ in a broad triad of climate policy mechanism for cutting CO2 emissions, but is also the most politically difficult. This talk will briefly review the role of carbon pricing, the debates between taxation and emissions trading as a way of achieving it, and some of the key lessons learned from the European Emissions Trading Scheme which is now in its seventh year. The talk will then focus on the concerns around carbon intensive sectors, and appropriate treatment of them that recognises the inevitably evolutionary nature of international participation, combined with the need for incentives to broaden international action.

Speaker: Prof Michael Grubb, Chair of the international research organisation Climate Strategies, headquartered at Cambridge University where he is also a Senior Research Associate at the Faculty of Economics. He is a leading expert in industry competitiveness under the EU ETS and has been leading research on industrial competitiveness and carbon leakage for the last four years.